


fulcrum

by Kurukami



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Ficlet, Gen, change just one thing, mental illusions, the saddest words are "might have been"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 03:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7027000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Probability is a finicky thing.  Change just one detail, and events can spill out entirely differently, or individuals still take the same actions but the nuances of their motivations have changed.</p><p>Or:  Wanda hasn't yet realized the full extent of her powers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fulcrum

**Author's Note:**

> One of the questions that arose in my head after a viewing or two of Civil War was: why didn't Wanda use the mental illusions or telepathic abilities that she had in Age of Ultron? It could be argued that maybe she just didn't have the time, or the focus (doubtful, after having had more than a year to practice). Perhaps it was a conscious choice, then, Wanda deliberately holding back from the fullest reach of her powers (just as Hawkeye was pulling his punches against Black Widow).
> 
> So what happens if something happens to cause her to no longer hold back?

. . : . .

She’s trying to keep the tower from falling when the blast hits her.

Wanda doesn’t even see who did it. All she knows in that moment is sound, and agony, and carried in on that tide of pain rage, _rage_ , boiling out of her like steam from a ruptured pipe, and if she could frame a coherent thought she might think – 

_– je to to, co cítí vrak? –_

– but she can’t, can’t think in words, can barely even _see_ through the rawness of it, and her hands over her ears do nothing to stop it. Toppling, convulsing, she dimly feels the concrete of the tarmac rise up to strike her, scraping her bloody at knee and hip, elbow and knuckles, cheek and forehead.

Some span of time later – she can’t track when, differentiate _this_ second from _that_ in the cacophony – the pain finally stops.

Wanda blinks eyes that don’t want to focus. Tries to push herself back up. Can’t. Can barely lift a hand. There’s someone – there’s a silhouette coming towards her, a figure almost black against the painfully blue sky, the whisper of thoughts against her consciousness, and she thinks _go, fear, see anything but me_ and puts aside the restraint she’s been holding tight to for more than a year and _lunges_ with the power inside of her, grabs hold with her mind, and _twists_ and – 

. . : . .

He had been trying to help her.

Wanda realizes that, after.

. . : . .

  
_(there is  
a vast starry expanse)_

_(the likes of which he has never seen but which_  
_somehow still seems strangely_  
_familiar)_

_(long sinuous forms writhing against it like_  
_sharp-spined eels of gargantuan size,_  
_undulating towards a crack in the sky, and through that torn-open auroral wound_  
_the Earth)_

_(their flanks are clustered with legions of parasite-soldiers, and_  
_flitting around them an uncountable plurality of comparatively miniscule transports)_

_(behind him he somehow hears_  
_the subaural whisper of flesh twisting, enamel clicking against itself, and thinks_  
_of wolves tearing flesh from the bones of prey_  
_though he knows it is merely that One’s features coming to resemble_  
_what some might term a smile)_

_(somewhere, there is a voice  
shouting for his aid)_

_\-- Vision, target has thrusters, turn him into a glider --_

_(and Vision)_

_(tries to turn, to see_  
_what he can do_  
_to help and sees the_  
_colossal heliotrope figure that is the One,_  
_hulking, imposing, titanic,_  
_and a voice like the grinding of worlds against each other intones)_

_(“– all of this, it is possible – because of you –”)_

_(a monstrous hand reaches towards him, blotting out the light and_  
_panicking_  
_he focuses his will upon the energy coiled tight inside the_  
_Stone_  
_within his head, lashing_  
_outwards with a coarse unrestrained beam,_  
_but the massive fingers ignore it and_  
_take hold and_  
_grasp and_  
_crush_  
_and_  
_with a wet, crackling, dissonant atonality_  
_pluck the_  
_gleaming_  
_halcyon_  
_infinity_  
_from the ruined eggshell of his skull_  
_and, dying, he hears)_

_“RHODES!”_  


. . : . .

Later, confronted with the unflinching reality of James Rhodes lying crippled in a hospital bed, the words that rise within him – 

_– I became distracted –_

– seem entirely insufficient.

Vision wishes there were some method, some logic, some protocol he could enact to unweave the things that have come to pass.

It is as he predicted: catastrophe. That his analysis proved accurate is cold comfort when set beside the magnitude of his error. But perhaps he did not properly consider all of the variables, properly match measures to calculations to prevent equivalent calamities from reoccurrence. Perhaps…

Perhaps.

. . : . .

She saw it all happen.

She wants to take it all back.

All of it. Wants to retract the decision, stamp down the emotions that caused her to lash out, wants to unspool the causal film reel of _what happened_ , take it back to _what might be_ and turn the entire, chaotic, cataclysmic mess another way.

But even if she could, if she had some rudder at hand to twist the steerage of reality –

– where would she even turn?

At the melee in the airport? Leaving the compound at Clint’s side in the first place? Not being at hand when bullets lashed down to cut her brother to pieces? Joining the metal giant’s crusade against Stark? Being six inches to the left when an iron-monger’s bomb tore apart their home and murdered their family, alongside so many others that month, that day, that hour?

At which moment did everything go wrong, to lead to this? 

How can she possibly ever know?

She thinks, and thinks, and thinks, alone in the cell, despair and regret tangling around her heart, horribly glad that her dangerous arms and her murderous hands are bound tight inside the folds of the straitjacket. There is little else for her to do, save consider the things she has experienced, the books she has read, the bits of knowledge and the abstruse intuitions she keeps hidden away inside of her. Decisions. Events. Probabilities. Passages and words and what passes for wisdom. She flicks through all of them in her thoughts, bumping her head against the metal walls of the cell, again and again and again.

One that comes back to her, over and over, are the words she’d discovered in a book of quotations late one night, unsettled by nightmares and unable to sleep. _Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to rest it, and I shall move the world._

If she can simply think of what that place might be, and find the means to bend the world to fix all that has gone wrong, then…

Then.

. . : . .

**Author's Note:**

>  _je to to, co cítí vrak?_ – Czech (Googled, not fluent): is this what the hulk feels?


End file.
